Jacky Leung was halfway up Britain’s tallest mountain when he noticed the woman behind him. She wore a cap pulled low. The wind was brutal.
Rain lashed the trail. He did not think much of it at first.
Then he placed her. The Princess of Wales. Climbing Ben Nevis right behind him.
No bodyguards. No entourage.
Just two camera operators and the same 1,345-metre slog every other hiker faced that day. Leung told 7NEWS he froze. He did not know what to call her.
“I could not really know what the proper names I should name her because I don’t want to be impolite,” he said. So he kept it simple. She asked if he had made it to the top.
He said yes. She said well done.
He told her she was inspiring. She said thank you. “It was just mental,” Leung said.
The Princess reached the summit as part of the National Three Peaks Challenge, raising money for cancer research and support. She posted a photo of herself at the top.
In a statement, she wrote about her own experience with cancer. “Cancer doesn’t just affect the body. It changes how you think and feel and profoundly affects every aspect of life,” she wrote.
“I know this personally, and that the journey through and beyond treatment requires more than medicine alone.” The climb happened in stormy conditions. Leung said the Princess’s cap covered her face well. Most other climbers likely did not recognise her.
He did. And he said she kept her smile, stayed sincere, stayed kind.
For the people who donate to cancer charities, who run fundraising races, who walk for a relative in remission, this matters. A working royal who has said publicly that she knows what cancer treatment does to a person — not from briefings, not from hospital visits, but from her own body — chose to do something physical, something hard, something public. She did it in bad weather on a mountain in Scotland with no security detail in sight.
The Three Peaks Challenge involves climbing the highest mountains in Scotland, England and Wales. Ben Nevis is the tallest.
The Princess did not just show up for a photo. She climbed it. Leung saw her on the trail.
He saw her at the summit. He said she was down to earth. People living with cancer, people caring for someone with cancer, people who have lost someone to cancer — they are the ones most directly affected by this.
Not because a royal climbed a mountain. Because the person who climbed it said the journey through treatment requires more than medicine.
She said it from a place of personal knowledge. And she went up a mountain in the rain to raise money for the kind of support she said she needed. Leung was speechless.
He said so. But he also spoke.
He told a reporter what he saw. A princess who kept climbing. A princess who said well done to a stranger on a trail.
A princess who thanked him when he said she was inspiring. “I was so happy,” Leung said. “It was just mental.”
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